Commercial High Availability (HA) solutions conventionally provide an umbrella framework in which processes and other resources are controlled, and made highly available, across a range of systems that reside under the control of the umbrella (cluster).
Low-cost HA software packages generally do not meet the operating requirements or provide the flexibility required for many different solution architectures; making them unsuitable for all but a limited number of qualified situations. These limited situations include those where conditions and requirements match assumptions built into the software (including concurrency vs. outage, pre-emptive vs. wait'n'see, and fast-failover vs. resource depletion trade-off decisions).
High function HA software packages, by contrast, are typically able to meet stringent operating requirements. However, they usually are only available for a single vendor's platforms, mandate highly structured and complex clustered architectures, require redundant hardware adapters, and have purchase and maintenance costs that are inappropriate for many solutions.
Therefore, there is a need to provide an HA software solution that overcomes the aforementioned disadvantages.